Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period

Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, David R. Winter, Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, David R. Winter, Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, David R. Winter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319757384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about— preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that an awareness and understanding of the nature and capabilities of spirits—whether benevolent or malevolent—was fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750. This is, therefore, a book about how epistemological and experiential knowledge of spirits persisted and evolved in concert with the wider intellectual changes of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2018

Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell and David R. Winter (eds.)Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern PeriodPalgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75738-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Theory and Practice in Early Modern Epistemologies of the Preternatural

Michelle D. Brock¹ and David R. Winter²

(1)

Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA

(2)

Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada

Michelle D. Brock (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

David R. Winter

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 1710, the French abbot and polygraph Laurent Bordelon wrote a satire intended to expose the frivolous superstitions of those who read and believed accounts of demons , hobgoblins, fairies , and the like. Entitled L’histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle , the story centers on the credulous M. Oufle (an anagram of le fou—the fool), a merchant who spends his nights reading books of magic, charms, apparitions and divinations , thoughtlessly trusting the veracity of these texts in the face of any rational argument to the contrary. He commissions paintings of magicians and diviners surrounded by hosts of devils , specters, and phantoms in a variety of horrible and ridiculous forms. He fills his bookshelves with writings by some of the leading occultists and spiritologists from the previous century, including those of Cornelius Agrippa , Pierre de Lancre , Henri Bouguet , and Jean Bodin . Immersed in these anachronistic, “superstitious” images and texts, Oufle becomes variously convinced that he had been bewitched, transformed into a werewolf , and tormented by devils in the shapes of butterflies that followed him around relentlessly.¹

Bordelon’s L’histoire—translated into English the following year as A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle —was part of the larger corpus of works beginning in the late sixteenth century and proliferating in the early Enlightenment that rejected claims about preter- and supernatural beings maintained largely on the basis of belief, bolstered by a selective and uncritical reading of various printed texts.² This point is perhaps most clearly illustrated in Oufle’s “Discours sur les Diables,” a short tract included in the story, penned, we are told, by the merchant in an attempt to convince his brother—the tellingly named Noncrede—of his perfect knowledge of spirits and their marvelous operations in the universe.³ Here, Oufle cites authorities as diverse as Balthasar Bekker , Martin Delrio , and Johann Wier , alongside Theodoret, Gregory of Nyssa , Apollinarius , Aristotle , and Hesiod —with some strange outliers like Leo Africanus and the Qur’an —to prove a number of popular and ill-reasoned claims about the power of devils : that they can metamorphose into monks, beggars, or lawyers; elm, oak, or frozen trees; dogs, asses, prognosticating caged birds, straw, lettuce leaves, gold; even wheels and whole rivers.⁴ M. Oufle reads books much as Menocchio , the Friulian miller, had done more than a century earlier.⁵

At the core of Bordelon’s critique of the fictional Oufle, however, was not simply his gullibility or foolish superstition . It was his utter failure even to attempt to understand the beings he encounters in his books. Bordelon wrote at one point that to reason with men like Oufle—to discuss with them rationally the natural philosophical principles their beliefs seem to confound—is to talk with them in a language they do not understand and which they are not inclined to study.⁶ Oufle and his kind knew spirits only in the sense in which they were reported and described in a literature that was increasingly at odds with the rationalist tenor of the age, with its new modes of evidence gathering and analysis and new conceptions of proof.⁷

But more than this, Abbé Bordelon’s text is a lampoon of the beliefs themselves. Most strikingly, perhaps, the text features an engraving by Giuseppe Maria Crespi depicting Oufle viewing the witches’ sabbat that borrows heavily from the imagery of the 1613 “Description et Figure du Sabbat des Sorciers ” by Jan Ziarnko that accompanied de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons . But while Ziarnko’s illustration was intended to make visual some of the horrors recounted by accused witches to de Lancre during his time in the Basque country , Crespy’s was intended to depict the vision of a superstition -ridden fool—indeed, to underscore the point, a fool in full regalia stands behind Oufle pushing him forth into the sabbat.⁸

Despite the force of the theologically trained abbé’s critique, most Europeans of the early modern era continued to inhabit a spirit-wracked world. Well into the eighteenth century, they largely accepted the premise that nature was alive with spirit activity and that, more than this, their actions could be detected across the breadth of creation.⁹ It was a view that was grounded in scripture and refined by many centuries of rumination, belief, and experience. To be sure, the precise nature of these beings—demons , angels, fairies, and ghosts —was the subject of many vibrant debates, but their general existence was assumed and experienced by people across the social hierarchy.

While the processes for ascertaining information about spirits could be a complex and deeply fraught matter, the ability to understand their operation became a fundamental element of the many and varied knowledge-making practices of the period. Natural philosophers, magical practitioners, medical specialists, layfolk, and others applied themselves to the task of learning the veritable nature and habits of demons and spirits with earnestness, albeit to different ends. Indeed, what Bordelon’s work does capture is something of the diversity of approaches to spiritology through M. Oufle’s use of a wide variety of sources from different discursive traditions. However, unlike the gullible M. Oufle (whose beliefs were neither cautious nor subtle), a large number of pre-modern Europeans appear to have made meticulous, detailed, and sometimes almost empirical readings of the precise form and scope of demonic activity in the world. Theologians and scientists, magicians , philosophers, missionaries , and artists might all elaborate their own particular views with respect to how and why demons undertook the actions they did, but in most instances their reckonings were grounded in painstaking observation, research, and debate. The reason for caution was manifest: at stake was the disposition of one’s very soul. Within the ambit of the early modern world system, demons and spirits were vital constituents of creation; understanding why they functioned as they did might reveal key elements of the divine plan to a society anxiously seeking signs of salvation.

Yet the early modern era was also one of great change and upheaval. From the intellectual ramifications of the printing press to the century of religious warfare that followed on the heels of the Reformation to the first sparks of disruptive Enlightenment ideologies, this period was characterized by profound instability as venerable social, intellectual, and political structures were reworked and reoriented. At the same time, early modern Europeans experienced and reinforced important continuities, both consciously and unconsciously. Many men and women continued to believe and behave as they had for centuries in a world that remained hierarchical, agricultural, and most important for our purposes, suffused with supernatural forces.

The various reformations of the period—Protestant, Catholic, Radical, and so on—fractured consensus about these supernatural forces and generated profound questions, on the page and from the pulpit, about how Christians might and ought to interact with spirits , both malevolent and benevolent. These questions were in no way peripheral or confined to the debates of educated elites. Indeed, outbreaks of witch-hunting and cases of demonic possession generated (and were generated by) anxieties concerning the spirit world among Europeans from across the social spectrum.¹⁰ At the same time, Catholic and Protestant churches alike increasingly attempted to exert control over how individuals perceived and interacted with the forces of magic and the spirit realm, although confessional methods and motivations for doing so could differ markedly.¹¹ Widespread anticipation of the Apocalypse cast a long shadow over religious life throughout Europe.¹²

This was also an era of discovery, evolving ideas about science , changing standards of evidence, and challenges to long-held tradition.¹³ By the early eighteenth century, debates about “reason” and “rationality” occupied the center of European intellectual discourse, engaging with and reshaping demon and spirit epistemologies.¹⁴ How could one prove or disprove the existence of demons , fairies , and angels? To what extent did the devil intervene in the terrestrial realm, or was the ability to do so confined to God ? Were interactions with the spirit world simply illusions, manifestations of human sin, or gullibility? Such questions were not new to the early modern era, of course. But many of the tools for addressing them—the printed page, scientific empiricism, increasingly complex understandings of matter, geography, and the cosmos, the networks of peer review—were new and, at times, disruptive to the status quo. And yet for many men and women, belief in the terrestrial reality of benevolent and malevolent spirits was no less fervent or consequential in 1750 than it had been in 1500.¹⁵ In short, this was a period in which the theory and practice of knowing demons and spirits was contested, in flux, and essential.

This book, then, explores the manifold ways of knowing the preternatural beings that inhabited and shaped early modern European w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Knowing in Theory
• Part III. Knowing in Practice
• Part IV. Afterword
• Back Matter